Unity Torrent Lens Adds Piratebay Ban Proxy for UK Users

The ‘scope’ used to fetch search results from The Piratebay website was broken earlier this year following a court order for UK ISPs to block access to the popular but controversial torrent sharing site.

Since then, UK Ubuntu users have not been able to uses the lens to search for, view or download torrents.

But in a new update the Piratebay-Scope has added search support via one of the many “proxy” sites that popped up in wake of the ban, allowing UK residents to circumvent it.

‘Ineffective’

Data leaked to the BBC by one UK ISP suggests that the ban has had little effect on P2P traffic.

A dip of 11% in torrent traffic was seen immediately following the ban, but this was short-lived.

The anonymous ISP told the BBC that, as of July, “…volumes are already pretty much back to where they were before.”

Install Piratebay Scope and Torrent Lens in Ubuntu 12.04

Anyone with this lens and scope set installed you’ll find this update waiting for them in Ubuntu’s Update Manager.

For everyone else you will need to add the Scope Packagers PPA and install through that: